Part of the problem is we had our hopes up. We kept hearing the expansion was gunning for PoP 2, that it was going to be a major raid expansion with a lot of content, and honestly I don’t think any expansion could live up to that. But what really made TSS disappointing was conscious design decisions that might have made sense at one time, but just are terrible now.

Every expansion has had some kind of time sink involved for locked content. Early on in eq’s life, before content was instanced, you had a strong argument for making it as difficult and painful to reach as possible. The harder it was to access, the more of a natural weeding out process happened, and you just didn’t have as much fighting over limited content and the massive customer service headaches that would cause. As the years went on, even before instancing, you started to see content become more and more spread out. The length of time to go from single group player to raider of the newest content kept increasing, and you saw guilds at dramatically different teirs of progression, and the process became less important. Difficulty of the content itself would be a natural barrier.

Despite that, the game’s design never seems to take advantage of that. You have instancing now, and for the last several years all significant raid content has basically been instanced with a few exceptions, making competition on server pretty much meaningless. What should separate people is strictly their capabilities and their ability to take on content, and that’s just not being as true as it should be.

Ideally, you should have content where there’s no reason to have any requirements to enter whatseover. If you aren’t ready, you’ll lose. If you are, you’ll win. There’s no real reason at all to have difficulty -not- be the barrier, since even if you pull out the old silly argument about timesinks dragging out the length of the expansion, it’s self evident that just isn’t true. TSS had the most agonizingly painful and downright annoying timesink of any expansion since Luclin, and frankly I would prefer to vex key and farm banes for a guild over grinding faction for an entire guild again. Despite having probably the worst timesink in EQ, it was one of the easiest, fastest beaten expansions I’ve done. With the exception of the second fight of Lethar, I can’t really describe any fight as ‚hard‘, and even Lethar 2 is kind of pushing it. Any and all downgrades to any of these mobs was unnecessary. We had a complete expansion to gear up on, and prepare for, and it didn’t matter at all, since the content was a walk over.

One problem is complexity is -not- difficulty. Some of the eq1 fights are so complicated that I couldn’t even begin to describe them to raider friends that play WoW or eq2. You have fights with a dozen different mechanics going on, and requiring 30 different jobs to be done to deal with it. That’s great. But the problem is, that doesn’t mean that the jobs are necessarily hard to do. It’s challenging from a coordination perspective, sure, but most guilds on eq have had literally years to work together. Unless there’s curve balls thrown at a raid by just the numbers involved putting in some element of chance for people to be forced to deal with, like the old bigger hitters in the past, current guilds will just stomp them.

I’d say the majority of eq1 raiders now at the bleeding edge play only because they enjoy trying to approach a raid as a problem and work through it. It sure as hell ain’t the loot. This doesn’t require raids to be complicated, just hard. Avatar of War was the simplest mob in the game, but people were more than a little bit precise in just how organized tank swaps and dealing with his damage spikes. Players will always innovate and become more and more precise to deal with problems that arise, and it’s just not necessary to make things incredibly complex if you have things that will rock them back on their heels in a fight. Let players make emergent strategies, and keep things simple for the minor raid bosses… especially since it isn’t very fun to have an incredible complicated, but laughably easy script bug out and crash 10 times due to its complexity and lock you out of progression. Save the complexity for fights that should be memorable, and should be worth it, not for ones that once you know what’s going on you distribute loot about with no deaths on your first try.

And if mobs are difficult, and just will annihilate a force not ready for them, it further emphasizes just how stupid and unnecessary this massive single group flagging/factioning/keying really is. I can’t think of a single good reason for it. The single biggest comment I hear time and again from people asking about coming back to eq1 is that flagging blocks them. PoP pretty much -only- had raid flagging, and it worked. Basically, single group content requirements punishes raiding guilds for raiding, since anyone that wants to pop back into everquest just can’t without some people running off to help them. Most eq1 players in top raid guilds could care less about single group content, so it’s the exception rather than the rule that ever comes back and catches up. I can easily think of 50 times people have asked about coming back, and when I started to describe what was needed in groups, not in raids, said no. It’s silly and unnecessary. Remove flags, or just make flags raid only. Single groups for raiders is pointless in this game.